1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (3 page)

New sounds were explored, such as the jangle, the sitar, and feedback. Baroque pop blended rock with elements of classical music, using harpsichords, flutes, string quartets, Bach-inspired melodies, and Gregorian chants. Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead—with their liquid light shows, strobes, multimedia projections, and extended instrumental jams (not to mention spiked Kool-Aid)—established the model for rock concerts and raves to follow.

While the musicians birthed psychedelia, Dylan brought surrealism to lyrics. When he and the Byrds defied acoustic purists and matched the visionary depth of folk music with the raw power of electric rock, they proved it was possible to have both artistic freedom and a hit. Dylan’s tracks on
Bringing It All Back Home
and
Highway 61 Revisited
liberated his peers to write about anything they wanted and, along with the Beatles’
Rubber Soul
, ushered in the era of the rock album as a cohesive work of art, as opposed to a random collection of hits and filler songs.

As the civil rights movement reached its crescendo, the golden age of soul fused the transcendence of gospel with the catharsis of rhythm and blues. Motown broke pop’s glass ceiling, fueled by competition both inside the company and with other soul labels such as Stax Records. Meanwhile, James Brown invented funk by stripping everything out except the rhythm, and thus built the foundation for all dance music to follow.

In country, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard rebelled against the Nashville sound.

Even Frank Sinatra managed one of his most remarkable comebacks in a career full of them, with the Grammy Award–winning albums
September of My Years
and
A Man and His Music
.

You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing a new classic: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “My Generation,” “People Get Ready,” “Nowhere Man,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “The Sound of Silence,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Freedom Highway,” “It’s My Life,” “Respect,” “I Fought the Law,” “My Girl,” “Go Where You Wanna Go,” “One Love,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Do You Believe In Magic,” “We’re Gonna Make It,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” “In the Midnight Hour,” “California Dreamin’,” “Heart Full of Soul,” “I Can’t Help Myself,” “California Girls,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Norwegian Wood,” “I’ll Be Doggone,” “I Got You Babe,” “Nowhere to Run,” “Let Me Be,” “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Till the End of the Day,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

The Beatles loomed over their era like possibly no other artist has since. From January 1965 through January 1966 they enjoyed six No. 1 U.S. singles in a row, a feat unbroken until the Bee Gees tied it in 1979 and Whitney Houston topped it with seven singles in 1988. The emotional arc of those six singles reflects the shifting mood of that extraordinary year. The sunny “I Feel Fine” and “Eight Days a Week” matched the optimism both of America rebounding from President Kennedy’s assassination and Britain proud to be the swinging capital of pop culture. The hopefulness continued through the first half of the year, as blacks secured the right to vote in the South and President Johnson vowed to end poverty with such Great Society programs as Medicare and Medicaid.

But the Beatles turned melancholy in “Ticket to Ride,” and desperate with “Help!,” just as President Johnson began drafting thirty-five thousand men a month to Vietnam and Watts exploded in the worst case of urban unrest since the Detroit race riot of 1943.

The desolate “Yesterday” resonated with millions who felt a stable past was crumbling in the face of social upheaval. Parents began to see rockers as Pied Pipers leading their children to long hair and drug-soaked promiscuity. Rioters, black militants, antiwar radicals, and Acid Test partiers would soon scare enough voters to sweep Ronald Reagan into the governorship of California, an election that prophesized a nationwide shift away from liberalism. The pensive “We Can Work It Out” bemoaned the fussing and fighting that dominated the rest of the decade.

Dylan’s albums followed a similar emotional arc. The ebullience of his first rock album,
Bringing It All Back Home
, was in marked contrast to the darkness of
Highway 61 Revisited
, recorded just days after he was vilified at the Newport Folk Festival for going commercial. Buck Owens also weathered the outrage of puritans, for daring to mix country with rockabilly.

In fact, the argument over authenticity was a major theme of the year: the Beatles versus the Stones; the polished sounds of Motown’s session musicians the Funk Brothers and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra versus Stax’s Booker T. and the M.G.s and the Memphis Horns. Nashville’s slick A-Team versus Bakersfield’s steel guitars and Fender Telecasters. Ironically, many folk-rockers were backed by the LA studio pros dubbed the Wrecking Crew.

The biggest battle of all was America’s fight to reclaim its title as the center of pop music from the British Invasion. There were twenty-seven U.S. No. 1 hits that year; thirteen were British and fourteen American. On the British side, five were from the Beatles, two from the Rolling Stones, two from Herman’s Hermits, and four from other British artists. The American effort comprised six Motown hits (four by the Supremes), four folk-rock hits (two by the Byrds), three from the Brill Building hit factory, and one from the Beach Boys.

Probably the musicians’ most recurring struggle that year was the inner battle not to self-destruct. As they raced neck and neck to be the biggest acts on earth, artists such as the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Supremes, the Who, the Kinks, Marvin Gaye, and Johnny Cash threatened to implode, either from outside pressure or from personal demons.

*   *   *

At the dawn of 1965,
thanks to the postwar baby boom, half the U.S. population was younger than twenty-five, and 41 percent were younger than twenty.
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(By contrast, in 2012 only 23.5 percent of Americans were below the age of eighteen.) It was the most educated generation in history, buoyed by unprecedented prosperity. But the “generation gap” had not yet kicked in; teens mainly followed in the footsteps of their parents as they grew up. The Beatles were shaggy, but Paul McCartney soothed adults by singing show tunes. High school principals ensured that boys’ hair was kept short and that girls’ skirt hems reached below the knee.

If you needed to unwind, you drank alcohol or took pills. Amphetamine and barbiturate use was so widespread that Congress would pass the Drug Abuse Control Amendments on July 15, to rein in the consumption of stimulants and depressants. Eastern traditions such as yoga and meditation were mostly unknown, particularly as Asian immigration was heavily restricted. Many Americans considered psychologists and counselors “funny doctors,” and would not have considered seeing one themselves, as that might have implied there was something wrong with them.

In 1964 only 3.1 percent of American TV owners had a color set, though NBC started broadcasting almost all its shows in color in the fall of 1965, for those who did. Eighty percent of the country was white (11 percent black),
2
and many whites were still rural residents, as demonstrated by the shows that were popular then:
Bonanza
,
The Andy Griffith Show
,
Petticoat Junction
,
The Beverly Hillbillies
,
Gomer Pyle
,
Lassie
,
The Big Valley
,
The Virginian
,
Daniel Boone
,
The Wild Wild West
, and
Gunsmoke
. Other highly rated programs included
The Lucy Show
,
The Red Skelton Hour
,
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
,
The Lawrence Welk Show
,
The Donna Reed Show
, and
Gidget
. The Cold War was reflected in spy shows such as
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
and
Get Smart
. The wife had magic powers in
Bewitched
, but her husband tried to squelch her using them.

On the big screen, the top-grossing films were
The Sound of Music
,
Doctor Zhivago
, and the James Bond feature
Thunderball
. Movies almost always had happy endings, unless they were foreign. The Motion Picture Production Code prohibited nudity and scenes that were “unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful.”
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Comedian Lenny Bruce had been convicted for obscenity in April 1964 for, among other outrages, observing that Eleanor Roosevelt had the nicest breasts of all the First Ladies.
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The American economy was booming, and if you wanted a job, you could move to a factory town such as Flint, Michigan, and get one. “Oh God, I’m telling you, you could quit a job one day and get a job across town in another GM plant. They needed workers,” recalled former General Motors employee Don Spillman.
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The company was forced to send officials into the streets to find locals who could staff the assembly lines.

But down south, if you were black, the situation was different. The voting registrar administered literacy tests to dissuade you from voting. If you passed and still tried to vote, there would be reprisals from the Ku Klux Klan. Interracial marriage was still banned in twelve states. Many concert venues had only just stopped roping off the black section from the white section, per the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on segregation. The Beatles had to put riders in their contracts stipulating they would not play segregated venues.

If you were gay or had bisexual tendencies, your parents might take you to a psychiatrist who would give you shock therapy, as happened to future Velvet Underground member Lou Reed. If you had socialist beliefs, you kept quiet, because the Communist Control Act of 1954 made it illegal to be a member of the Communist Party, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was still investigating citizens with Communist ties.

Yet, recent technological and pharmaceutical innovations had begun to affect the collective unconscious. In 1965 their influence exploded in an unprecedented chain reaction.

Citizens in the North had been able to disregard the horrors of Jim Crow in the southern states, but now television beamed out images of southern police officers siccing their German shepherds on black teenagers and blasting them across the street with fire hoses, which ripped hair off their heads. After ABC interrupted
Judgment at Nuremberg
to broadcast footage from the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama, public outcry pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress, and federal monitors were sent to protect blacks as they voted in the South.

When Johnson started the ground war in Vietnam, TV broadcast images of soldiers burning huts while peasant families sobbed, causing many people back home to question the conflict. And televised antiwar demonstrations revealed that there was not complete consensus among the American public with regard to the war, causing many viewers to think harder about their own stance.

Up until now, women mostly had to choose between family and career, and few chose career. If you were an unmarried female, you were either a good girl or “fast.” Officially doctors prescribed the Pill only to married women, lest they be seen as contributing to wanton promiscuity, but more unmarried women were beginning to gain access to it. As pregnancy ceased being a concern, at a time when sexually transmitted diseases had been largely eradicated, many people began to rethink the “Madonna/whore” paradigm they’d been brought up with. In June, when the Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting the sale of contraceptives, it became possible to dispense the Pill to low-income married women on a mass scale as part of the War on Poverty, paving the way for the sexual revolution and unlocking passions pent up for eons.

LSD use was still largely under the radar, but many of its proselytizers, such as Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, found that the drug’s offer of a momentary glimpse of cosmic enlightenment jibed with the philosophies espoused by Asian religions. The two promoted ancient holy Tibetan texts and meditations and mantras. In the spring, both the Beatles and the Beach Boys would be dosed with acid for the first time; in autumn, Ken Kesey started holding his Acid Tests in public. Psychedelics offered a whole new way of perceiving reality, and their arrival created a hunger for a drug-free, permanent version of the same state of mind, which laid the groundwork for the spiritual revival and the human potential and consciousness movements.

At the time, only novels and foreign films could rival music in its ability to discuss civil rights, politics, sex, and drugs. But those other forms took a long time to produce. Dylan recorded whole albums in one to three days in which he advised against following leaders and warned that society would try to exploit you. And when he moved out of the (smaller) folk market and into the mainstream pop charts, he took the message from the already converted to mainstream teenagers—just as they began to receive their draft notices.

Singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie said:

The corporations, the businessmen and women who were controlling the entertainment business, did not understand the lyrics of the songs that they were selling. The guys on the radio didn’t get it. The guys that owned the radio had no connection with the music, in terms of understanding it. For the first time, there was an explosion of all different kinds of music being played. And the lyrics were unintelligible. Not just the lyrics—the philosophy, the heart of it, was unreadable, unknowable, to the people who controlled the industry. So all of a sudden, all around the world, for a very short time … imagine a world where everybody’s got a radio, and all of a sudden everybody’s saying what they really think, in words you could understand, but your parents couldn’t … A floodgate had opened, because we were using a language that couldn’t be understood over whose system we were using to communicate it. And it was so wonderful. People were walking down the street plain laughing, just having a great time, because all of a sudden, it was free.
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